HELP WANTED : Article Ideas

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Before asking a question, please check the
Linux Gazette FAQ to see if it has been
answered there.

Linux support call handling

I have been searching through the Linux Gazette website for anyting on the industry average of call handling times for Linux support. So far I have not found anything.

I was wondering if you had done an article or come across this. I was wondering if there were any industry documents that measured the average time it would take a customer to call in for support till the time that their problem was resolved.

Any information that you may have would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Darlene

I don't think we've ever covered that topic.
-- Mike

If anyone has enough information that isn't under some sort of NDA, to
write such an article, it'd be interesting to see. Unfortunately statistics
about how long an Answer Gang member takes to answer a querent are a bit fuzzy;
we don't get docked for answering late, nor promise we'll answer at all; some
"answers" are really requests for more data and touched with tidbits in the
hopes it will help somehow -- and we may or may not ever learn if our
reader got the answer they needed. (Well, that last part's no different from
phone support, anyway.)
-- Heather

BTW.. I tried sending this message to tag@lists.linuxgazette.net
(documented on your website)
and my mail was returned.

That address was changed because of the large
number of off-topic questions we received. The address was
posted widely on web pages with no explanation that it was for Linux
questions or that querents are supposed to do their own research first. The
current address is linux-questions-only at ssc.com.
Where did you see
tag@lists.linuxgazette.net documented? We changed the home page
and the current issue, although we haven't changed the back issues.
-- Mike

...but our readers are helpful souls. Thanks, Darlene! ...

I found
tag@lists.linuxgazette.net refrenced twice on the FAQ page under # 4 Guidelines for answering questions.

OK, thanks. We used to have a mailback running after we turned the
tag address off. Then the mailback got into a mail loop with one
address and we turned it off, but didn't think about updating the FAQ.
-- Mike

DSL Drivers

Hello eveyone at the gazette I've been all over the net trying to find
out the answer about problem im having I have an Efficient Networks 4060
USB Modem . I want to run Mandrake 8.1 but dont know if there any
drivers or if they even exist.maybe you guys can help me with any info

Lots of people have been caught with DSL USB modems without Linux
drivers. So there may be a driver, but it's not too likely. Your
best bet may be to return it for an external modem that connects to
an Ethernet card. These are much more Linux-friendly.

TAG members, are there any USB and/or internal DSL modems that do have
Linux drivers?
-- Mike

Apparently not enough of TAG use USB for serial gadgetry, so perhaps you
can help us out, dear readers!
-- Heather

university engineering team

This request originally arrived as a letter
to "our HR department." We advised them we aren't a company. They hope that
our readership at large will have a good idea or two about something specific
they can contribute to.

By the way, before you start groaning about
Visual Basic not being Linux, check out GNOME Basic at
http://www.gnome.org/gb ...
-- Heather

Thank you sir, as per your directions we are sending you same letter
addressed to linux users . so please publish it in your mailbag.
Also if you are having mail ids of some more organisations having projects
related to drivers, we request you to send them to us, so that we can cntact
them also.

We don't have a list of projects
related to drivers. But there are thousands of them.

Answer Gang, is there a list somewhere of Linux driver projects
these people can contribute to, or nonexistent drivers that need
to be written?
-- Mike

To,
Linux Users,

Subject: about getting sponsorship (technical guidance)

Respected sir,

We are students from 'College of Engineering, Pandharpur'(India),studing in
class B.E.Computer Science & Engineering.As we are entering into last year
of our curriculum, we are looking for Challenging and innovative
projects.Our project group is consisting of enthusiastic and motivated
students with good academic record,listed below

Mr. Yogesh Raut

Mr. Ajinkya Chavan

Ms. Sujata Silam

Ms. Varsha Sartape

Mr. Sachin Joshi

Sir, all of us have participated in different Paper Presentation and

software contests. We have
completed following projects-

'Design,Analysis,Simulation:Slider Crank Mechanism And Inversions'- got
'FIRST PRIZE' at 'TECHNOGLIMPSE 2001' a state level software project
contest.Also presented at 'DIPEX 2001' a state level project exhibition.
written in C++.

'OTHELLO'- a computer game presented at 'Insearch 2000', state level
software contest. Written in C language,involves 'artificial intelligence'.

A 'fighter game' which can be simultaneously played on two computers by
two different users and uses it's own protocol for networking. Written in
C++.

As we the Computer Engineering students we are interested in system level
projects like

Device Drivers

Operating system internals

As Linux is emerging as new leading Operating System of this era, we are
mostly interested in 'Device Driver' projects in Linux (or Unix).We are
looking for any such project which we are eager to do.

Sir, if you can sponsor us for any such project we will be grateful to you.
If you are not having any project, you can just sponsor project decided by
us. We don't expect any financial help from you, but just technical support.
We assure you that if you give us a single chance, we shall work with our
full strength and complete it within given period of time with quality
assurance.

We are eagerly waiting for your positive response. If you are affirmative
to our request, please tell us about further procedure to complete remaining
formalities. We are ready to personally come to your Company for further
procedure.

Deleting items in KDE 2.1.1 "Run Command"

The number of items listed in KDE's 2.1.1 "Run Command" is getting
ridiculous.

I'd like to edit this list. I've tried "Clear" but it merely clears the item
in the box, but retains the list. I've also tried editing "History= . . ." in
/home/username/.kde(2)/share/config/kdesktoprc file. Unfortunately, the list
remains intact whether I restart kde or not.

GUI and CMOS clock (2 Questions)

I am new to Linux and am desperate to solve 2 problems. I run a new
Evesham PC with a 1.4GHz Athlon chip, NVIDIA GeForce 2MX graphics card
with a Taxan crystal vision 680 TCO99-S monitor.

When I boot my SuSE 7.1 installation
from the floppy, the boot process
hangs at 'setting up CMOS clock'. I have to hit the restet button, boot
Windows, shut down Windows and restart Linux. I other words, I cannot
get Linux to boot sucessfully twice in a row. I have to boot WIndows in
between.

My second problem is with XFree86 ver4.0.2. The windowing system seems
to have a mind of its own. Usually when I arrive at the graphical
login, the scree is offset about 2 inches to the right. If I go into
Sax2 to configure using Xfine the screen display will 'snap' into place
when I stick with the 600x800 setting. When I come out of Sax2
sometimes the setting will be saved. Sometimes the virtual desktop
space is larger that the actual resolution setting. If I try to
configure for 1024x768, this does not work at all. On the limited
occasion I have got an 800x600 screen set up successfully, if I shut
down and reboot, the same problem reappears even thought I have
apparantly saved the settings.

poster

I'm a teacher of the computer study and I take care of the school
laboratory in the Special Secondery School.
The real name of my school is - Szkoła Zawodowa Specjalna nr 4 w Nowym
Sączu.

My pupils are different than the healthy children so I have to do
everything what is the best for them.
Because for some years I have been using Linux (Rh 5.0) in my private
computer I thought about my pupils.
So lately I have started to learn them the Linux system at school. Now
we've got only Linux in our laboratory.

At the moment I'm looking for some posters or calendars or
advertisements or others informations about
Linux. I want put them on the walls in my classroom. I hope that my
pupils'll be more interested in Linux this way.
So if you can help me please write how can I get these things which I
wrote before or how can I buy them.
Thanks a lot for helping me.

Rams Grzegorz
33-300 Nowy Sacz
ul.Kunegundy 68
POLAND

[Mike Martin]
Off the top of my head
Publicity departments of the following
Linux cos

Red Hat
SUSE
Caldera? (sorry - a bit of bias)
Mandrake

and Linux friendly cos

HP
IBM (with their linux promo budget they must have posters to give away)

and of course it would be worth checkong on debian and linux.com

[Frank]
Hi there!

I don't have any posters right now, but I've learned that most
companies are very willing to help with material like that, especially
if they feel they might gain future customers that way.

I had some very good experiences with SuSE, which sent me tons of
materials when I explained that I was active in some user groups and
was always out of folders. They still send me a professional version of
every new distibution for free, even though I mostly use Mandrake now.

Given that you're in Europe, just like me, SuSE might be your best
choice for this anyhow - although Red Hat, for instance, might like a
chance to get a bigger market too G

Just check company's websites for a contact e-mail (I happen to know
the SuSE-addy: suse@suse.de).

Hope this helps you!

We can send you the covers from several Linux Journal magazines over
the past year. Would you like that?

How to configure AutoFS to automount NFS exported volumes

I need to set up a RH Linux 7.1 system to automatically mount exported NFS
filesystems on the fly. I realize the security implications inherint in
such a request, but require the functionality despite the dangers right
now. On my Unix boxes I could simply add a line in the auto_master file
"/net -hosts -soft,noac" and set a couple of flags in the nfsconf file
(AUTOFS=3D1, NFS_CLIENT=3D1, NFS_SERVER=3D1) and everything works fine.
I've tried this on the Linux box without success. Is there something I'm
missing?

A little hard to read, but I think he's asking a different question than
Samba answers. Does anyone know how to ask a linux server about the peers
out there which are connected to its shares? If he knew an application
that does this, then he could read its source...

Note well, that all MSwin style shares
involving a Linux box are going to
be over TCP/IP, not NETBIOS. Even Microsoft doesn't recommend NETBIOS
anymore - it's a noisy protocol, so it scales horribly.
-- Heather

does anyone know how one can set quotas in linux for a directory rather than home

Hi!
Does anyone know how we can set quota to some directory for eg
/info/software
to limit say 50mb.I went through the man pages but was unsuccessfull in
setting the same.

Pls help

Thanks
Franco.F

Quotas are usually by userid, aren't they?
The only thing that I can think of is creating a filesystem image of ext2
type, and loopback mounting it at that directory. But using quotas
effectively would make a great article... especially if you have some real
world examples that get solved. Making enterprise Linux a little more fun?
:D
-- Heather

suggestion for "A need for Documentation" article

I have been reading your article "A need for Documentation". Very
interesting article.

I have made a
Linux documentation website project.
Why I hear people say we need documentation,
there no lots of good documents, etc.? Im trying to advertise my Linux
documentation project for lots of time, but no one reply me. I think that I
made a really good work in this documentation website. Im trying to tell
websites like you, LinuxGazette, to get my documents and give them to the
Linux community, but I get no reply from that sites. Maybe the need of
documents isnt so urgent.

Please, check my website.
I think there are good guides for variety of
Linux subjects. I think they can help the Linux community in the search for
good documentation in the net. I will really appreciate your interest in
my project. Thank you very much.

--
Best Regards,
Eran Levy.

"This is Linux country. If you listen carefully, you can hear Windows reboot..."

I think that you and Matthias
[the article's author] are talking about two different things,
although you both support the cause of documentation. You are trying
to provide a documentation portal for various types of Linux questions.
Matthias is trying to get program developers to document their own
projects better. If they do that, it will mean more content to put
on your site.
-- Mike

Hi Mike,
I really appreciate your reply for my E-mail. All the websites that I sent
E-mail to them about my Linux project website didnt reply me. I hope that
all the Linux sites will read the E-mails as you read. Keep up with your
excellent work! I hope for you and for Linux Gazette the best.

Whiptail vs Dialog

In Issue 69 of the LinuxGazette
(http://linuxgazette.net/issue69/issue69.html)
Heather Stern recommends
using Dialog over Whiptail, implying that Whiptail is brain-damaged. Having
just started to play with Whiptail (and having never done much scripting,
and none with Dialog), I was just wondering if she might expound on this a
bit more. I did a google search and a dogpile search for "whiptail versus
dialog", and this article was about the only relevant hit I found, so as of
now Heather's recommendation is all I have to go on.

Thanks!

Kent

Hi Kent!

There are at this point a large handful of variants which branched off from
Dialog 0.60 or so. The one in the Debian version (0.9a) is actively
maintained; it had at some time been in the hands of a different linux
flavor, which I wouldn't know except it was mentioned in the examples.
I consider whiptail wimpy because its features are not nearly as complete.
With dialog, I can actually do some very cool things with the --and-widget
feature, and the progress-bar gadget can be convinced to work. Essentially
I see whiptail as having made a pot shot at being dialog-compatible, but
working from an old revision, and at the time I wrote that article, I was
fuming about it because it was being strange about screen sizing. my
annoyance was made greater by the fact I couldn't get rid of the stupid package
since the debian base expected it for something, even though I had dialog
installed. I think that's fixed, these days. Anyway, there's a decent
amount of history at: http://www.AdvancedResearch.org/dialog
-- Heather

Linux in Africa

Hi,
I saw about the above article on linux gazette and I feel
that it is worthy. Though I'am not experienced in projects of
that kind, I'am sure I can help in the training. Please if you
have any comments or suggestions e-mail me.

He could. But since he hasn't yet, it's really putting words in his
mouth to say that Sklyarov was arrested for writing a program. -Bryan

[Mike]
No more misleading than to say, as you did,
"Sklyarov was arrested on suspicion of distributing that program
in the United States." When did he distribute it?

Better to say he was arrested for trafficking. But even if he argues that
writing the program alone was aiding and abetting its importation into
the US, it's misleading to say he was jailed for writing a program.
That's like saying that a person who shot someone to death was jailed
for discharging a firearm.

[Mike]
So we agree that he was not arrested for selling/soliciting/giving away
the program during this trip. So when did he distribute it? The US
jurisdictional claim rests on the web site, so they would have to show
he was somehow involved with it, or that by his association with the
company he was indirectly involved. His only role seems to be writing
the program. Thus, why I say he was arrested "for" writing it.
I just don't like the overemphasis on distribution/trafficking in
some accounts, because it suggests Dmitry had more involvement in
that end of things than we have reason to believe.

Dmitry was in the US to give a talk at a conference, not to sell a
program.

Right. The other common misconception of the case is that Sklyarov
was arrested for something he did on his trip to the US. Again, the
authorities have made no such claim.

[Heather]
I can read this two different ways. Either you are being sarcastic when
you say "Right" and you are declaring the statement that he was here to
speak at a conference, to be a misconception... which if so, has at least
some fallacy to it, as he was definitely here to present at a conference.

Or, you are agreeing that he was arrested for something he didn't do in the
US, which means that your disagreement with our point of view is merely that
you believe they had the right (perhaps the duty) to snap him up like that,
and we don't.

By the way the analogy would be closer to saying that the designer of a
certain variety of bullet shells was being held on charges that bullets
are used to murder people, never minding that they are also used to hunt
dangerous vermin and for food gathering in rural areas, including the rural
areas of other countries where one really does have to hunt for food, and
in areas where gun-toting is legally mandated.

Dmitry didn't "murder" anyone's eBook. (Hmm, he might have dissected several,
but it is likely provable that he had Rights to the copies in question.)
It's still as illegal as ever to clone a readable book, e- or otherwise,
without having been granted the right-to-copy. It's legal to own hammers
but not to smash unconsenting people's windows with them. I recommend that
you read the Copyright act in better detail:
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17 There are a
number of rights explicitly granted to libraries, which may not be
implementable if the DMCA is allowed its broadest scope. That, I'd say,
is a bug.

[Mike]
The DMCA's supporters would like to see it applied worldwide in any
way they can. This can be by claiming US jurisdiction or by getting
it written into international treaties and other countries' laws.
California has a "long-arm" law under which it claims jurisdiction for
any web site which is accessible to a Californian, whether or not the
site is located in California. This concept will continue to be pushed
and pushed.

Granted, the Department of Justice did not go that far in
the Sklyarov case. It merely claimed that because ElcomSoft had a web
site in the US selling the product, that was enough for US jurisdiction.
Of course ElcomSoft had already shut down the site voluntarily at Adobe's
"request" before this brou-ha-ha happened, and there's no allegation that
Dmitry was personally involved in that site or that he is an officer or
marketing directory for ElcomSoft rather than just a programmer.

So, the DMCA supporters may reluctantly accept that it cannot be applied
outside the US, but that doesn't make them stop trying to extend its
reach.

I haven't seen this. Statements I've seen by supporters indicate they
want it applied the same way a country's laws traditionally are
applied vis a vis other countries. I don't see anything new or
anything unique to the US. But maybe I haven't been reading radical
enough web pages.

Sure, Adobe would like there to be an international law applying to
every human being. But that wish is a long way from an actual present
claim against Sklyarov, and such a claim reported in LG is the basis
of my original letter.

[Heather]
I don't know whether to apply quite that level of slippery slope ... a
law to every human being ... to Adobe themselves. But I don't feel any
qualms about applying it to the people who wrote and voted for the DMCA
itself. I believe that what the DMCA supporters want is to be able to
sell and restrict every piece of data that might flow past them, until
they are more wealthy than the Ferengi clan who has the exclusive
concession on Q-tips(tm) cotton swabs.

The present claim may be unfounded;
I personally believe it to be worse than that since I think Adobe is biting
the hand that would feed them Russian customers. But I think the precedent
that speakers can be picked up and singled out for their corporate entities'
infractions, to be a quite terrifying one. You see, I don't honestly
believe that someone has a plane-bomb with my photograph taped to its nose,
or that I am any more likely to be in a building that gets toasted by
terrorism, than I am to merely get run over by a car when walking to the
supermarket, or struck by lightning the next time I go hiking, or win the
local Lotto. But I do expect to speak at events, and someday for those
events to be in other countries, who may have even weirder laws, be more
abitrary about making them, or have worse treatment of accused people. If
I end up in a situation where such a country has half a case, I no longer
expect the US to be able to protect me much ... because they've already
burned us in that regard. Alan Cox won't be at ALS -- because he's refusing
to travel here while this sort of nonsense is considered or even claimed to
be the law of our land. This has been called the "chilling effect" in
literature that follows censorship cases.

I'm not a lawyer, I'm a frightened human being, and I wrote my own opinion.
If you don't like it, tough. It's my free speech and our free press...
and I'd very much like to keep it that way. If that means speaking up for
the freedom to speak as well as the freedom to say particular things -
I'll do it.

Actually, ElcomSoft hired a company located in the US to collect the
money. I think the web site in question was that company's. However,
the company also has offices, employees, etc. on US soil. That's
not insignificant.

[Heather]
It makes it even worse. If EIcomSoft's US partner is the offender, it's
their top brass that should be standing in court. If EIcomSoft themselves
are the offenders, it's their export agents who should be standing there --
but in no case the programmer, because the code's legal and even REQUIRED
elsewhere, and reverse engineering itself, by fair means but not foul, is
(for the moment at least) legal here.

There's also precedent that "Code is Speech, and to be protected as such."
As for whether sanity will prevail, only time will tell.

[Mike]
I guess we're just going around in circles now, and the thing to do is
wait until the case is presented and see what the lawyers say then...

What we're really down to is the issue of what Sklyarov did vs what he
is accused of. I don't even pretend to know the detailed facts of the
case, so I won't argue whether he distributed, trafficked, aided, or
abetted. I don't know. And you know what? The FBI and US attorney
don't either. It takes a trial to answer questions like that.

I just think when one says "was jailed for..." in this pre-sentence
context, one is talking about what the person's accused of, not what
he did. I don't think Sklyarov is accused of writing a program. But
I think there are people, including LG readers, who believe that the
FBI would also arrest a person who wrote a copyright-busting program
even if it never entered the US. And that isn't true.

[Heather]
'Tis a fact he wrote a program. 'Tis unknown if it entered here;
or if it did, that it did anything they can claim as directly damaging;
but probable that it was published in the proceedings of his conference.
I think that if he is accused of something they manage to make stick,
it will be quite a slippery slope, the top point being, he wrote the
program, because they know he won't wriggle out of that one. As for what
the FBI would or would not do, I don't think am ad hominem argument on
their behalf is any more appropriate here than "I have kids and a wife,
can I go home now?" would be a good defense for Dmitry in court, and I don't
believe that you know what the FBI would or would not do, anyway. I do
believe that you trust them with your rights, further than I trust them with
mine.

The damage has already been done. I think it will take some very brave judges.

GAZETTE MATTERS

PDA user request

I know this my be a little much, but seeing as how palmtops are so abundant
these days. I was thinking how great it would be ig Linux Gazzette newest
issue was available at the same web page monthly so it could be synched as
as Avantgo (www.avantgo.com) channel.

There is a link http://www.linuxgazette.net/current that points to the
current issue. This was originally requested by somebody with a
palmtop, because he said it made it easier to download the latest issue
to his palmtop. Does this do what you want?

You can also go to
http://MY.FAVORITE.LG.MIRROR.com/current and get the
same thing.
-- Mike

Yes, thank you.

I don't want to favor one brand of palmtops
or one commercial channel site over another. (Is Avantgo commercial?)
-- Mike

Also, not trying to be
bothersome but if everything but the links to the articles was removed it
would better. But if that is too much could you please at least remove this
section from the bottom:

TWDT 1 (gzipped text file)
TWDT 2 (HTML file)

are files containing the entire issue: one in text format, one in HTML. They
are provided strictly as a way to save the contents as one file for later
printing in the format of your choice; there is no guarantee of working
links in the HTML version.
It would remove about 1Mb from the size or my download when I download the
page everything 1 link deep (I only have 16 Mb RAM) also if you were to do
that it would make a good Avantgo channel if they will carry it and possibly
get some other readers. Thanks.

We get many requests from readers to offer LG in different formats, make
the TWDT files better, remove the TWDT files, etc. We can't please
everybody. What we have is a compromise that has evolved over the
years. I'm not happy with the TWDT files either--it means any time I
make a correction I have to change the same thing in three files--but
there is so much reader demand for them that we cannot drop them.

Perhaps you can arrange with a mirror to offer a customized version of
LG optimized for palmtop reading. The mirror could make a script that
downloads the files and removes the TWDT versions, or replaces them with
small files that explain that the larger files are available only on
normal mirrors.
-- Mike

Some of the mirrors seem not to be functioning.

The mirrors page is way out of date. We're moving the entries into a
database to make updating easier ... but the project isn't done quite yet.
[Update 31-Oct-2001: But it is done now. See the next message.] -- Mike

I just thought it would be nice to be able to keep up a little
better (information overload you know).

Thanks for all your suggestions. When readers show enough interest in the
Gazette to suggest improvements, it makes us feel like our work is worthwhile.
-- Mike

Yes I forgot avantgo is commercial.
It is free to use personally, but they charge for providing content (I
think). They used to allow users to share custom channels but not currently.
Plus they support mainly WindowsCE.

Would you like to be our palmtop researcher? We could put a section on
the Mirrors page about LG resources for PDA users. That way it wouldn't
matter if they were commercial, because the Mirrors page is supposed to list
everything. What we'd need would be solutions for a variety of palmtops.

Are there any articles you might like to write about Linux and palmtops?
Or any 2-Cent Tips you can provide on reading LG on your palmtop?

What exactly are these "channels"? Are they just a set of links to the
articles in the current issue?

LG has an RSS file now.
http://www.linuxgazette.net/lg.rss.
This was originally created at
Linux Focus' request so we can
share current article links. (We put LF's links in
News Bytes.) Any site may parse this
file and use it to generate links to the current LG articles on their
web page.
-- Mike

Are there any linux apps that keep you up to date on html content (ie
channel subscriptions).

There are programs that moniter a list of webpages and let you know whether
any have changed. I haven't used any of them. Look in your distribution.
You can also write a program in Python to do this, using the urllib
module.
-- Mike

I think you'll want to take a look at Sitescooper (http://www.sitescooper.org)
- while it's rather Palm specific, I think it uses Plucker under the hood.
Of course it's source available and already knows a whole bunch of PDA formats
so it can almost certainly be tweaked to other handhelds and PDA-doc formats.
Linux Gazette is there already, item 135 in their list last I looked
-- Heather

If anyone wants to do a mirror of LG that is dedicated to keeping it in
formats friendly for handhelds -- provide the results on a publicly
accessible site, and we'll gladly add you to the mirrors database.

The license that the Linux Gazette is under certainly allows for this sort
of transformation. Other sites might give you more of a complaint, but we
sure won't!
-- Heather

LG Mirrors page renovation

The LG mirrors page has been revamped.
25 new sites have been added, and the HTML has
been regularized. All the entries are now in a database, making Your Editor's
task easier.

This project originally started in February, with me cutting-and-pasting
the data into a text file in mail-header format. This was taking forever, so I
got Dan Wilder to write me an awk script. This saved 90% of the typing,
although I still had to make lots of manual changes due to the irregularities
in the original HTML document (created many moons ago, and added to over time).
I wrote a small Python program to load the mail-header file into MySQL, then
used mysqldump/mysql to make further changes.

I plan to write an article about all this, but first I want to write a
routine to verify the links and delete the ones that are persistently down. In
the meantime, the program listing and template are on my web site http://iron.cx/cheetah/index.html#lgmirrors
(temporary link).